As humans reshape environments, we drive away many creatures. A select few species stick around or even come to join us: the rats who relish our trash, the pigeons who make cliffs of our skyscrapers, the coyotes as at home in our cul-de-sacs and city parks as they are in deserts.
Add to that list the blue dasher dragonfly, an azure-tailed aeronaut with a canted, ready-for-takeoff stance. In a paper published last month in the journal BMC Ecology and Evolution, researchers detailed the survival strategies of these insects, who happily make their homes in the scuzzier corners of our built environment.
Most dragonflies are so sensitive to pollutants that their very presence indicates a healthy ecosystem. As a result, they “don’t tend to do well in urban environments,” said Manpreet Kohli, an assistant professor at Baruch College at the City University of New York and an author of the paper.
The blue dasher flips this rule on its head. Across North America, this bug skips national parks for cities, said Ethan Tolman, also an author of the paper and a postdoctoral research associate at Virginia Tech. While leading high schoolers on insect-collecting trips, Dr. Kohli said, she would spot the dragonflies throughout New York City and New Jersey, their larvae thriving in algae-choked seeps and the adults decorating Turtle Pond in Central Park.
“You’ll be like, ‘Oh my God, there’s a dragonfly here?’” Dr. Kohli said. “And it’s most likely a blue dasher.”
Unlike some dragonfly species, blue dashers aren’t known to migrate regularly or even to move much between ponds. The authors decided to investigate how these bugs arrived in different cities in the first place — and, once there, how they have hovered gracefully above the many pressures of urban living.
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